In interviews with various CEOs, some of the most often asked questions include how they forge their relationships with their technology vendors.

IT vendors are integral to business, and they command a pivotal position in the Information Technology architecture.

How does a CEO select a technology vendor, given the fact the market is flooded by myriad big name peddlers of technologies.

Yes, finding the right sourcing strategy for hosted application management is always on the top of the list of IT companies.

As the world economy continues to recover, CEOs are increasingly turning their focus to strategic, revenue generating goals.

But at the same time they do not want to lose sight of cost control and bottom-line profits.

Most organizations these days turn to vendors for hosted application management to achieve their corporate objectives.

The benefits of outsourcing for hosted application management include:

• Shifting costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure.
• Leveraging the expertise of the hosting service and intellectual property
• Taking advantage of technology vendor’s economies of scale

But CEOs are also aware that partnering with a hosting vendor also involves risks. Data security can be one of the key ones, besides other perils.

Here are ten questions a CEO would ask his potential vendor.

1. Will you be able to boost my performance?

Applications are vital tools that sustain customer-facing resources and business processes. A company necessarily has to employ approaches to ensure application uptime and accessibility generates high customer satisfaction.

2. What are your innovative ways by which my costs can come down?

The company website must handle millions of page views per month. Therefore to deliver performance, the costs must be low enough.

Moreover, companies that are moving their select IT capabilities to cloud must save money compulsorily.

3. Will I be able to generate economies of scale?

It is often difficult for individual enterprises to achieve on their own their business objectives. Hosting providers must be able to leverage their infrastructure and technologies to generate economies of scale to their clients.

4. What are the different competencies in your data center and hosted infrastructure?

The provider must have a spectrum of integrated solutions that include cloud services, managed hosting, colocation to name a few.

5. Are your technical support levels adequate?

Ideally, a good hosting vendor must have a support model that has several layers of customer support. A designated team provides continuous monitoring service for the customer’s application and infrastructure. In addition the vendor must also have a specialized person who will align service offerings to meet customer’s needs and satisfaction.

6. I would like to know more about your application reliability and data security. Do you have a disaster recovery plan?

A vendor must be able to convince its clients that they have the accreditations and capabilities that will ensure sites and applications are secured by best processes and technologies.

In case anything unexpected happens, the vendor must be able to protect vital data by powering clients’ website with enterprise-grade encryption.

The vendor must have a RPO or recovery point objective that should be in real time.

7. With your services will I be able to accelerate speed to market and shorten product development cycle?

For an organization, the speed to market can make the difference between success and an overlooked opportunity. The vendor must be fully prepared to rapidly innovate and deliver applications that the clients want.

8. Are you able to attract and hire top performing employees?

The technology vendor’s services are as good as their employees. A rundown on the vendor organization’s employee profile can speak a lot.
 
9. Can you provide examples of successful similar deployments?

The technology vendor may advertize solutions that look enticing, but the proof is in the pudding. It is always comforting for a CEO to know that his organization is not the first to implement the specific configuration that the vendor is offering.

10. What are your SLAs and do you have a strong history of Service level performance?

SLAs or service level agreements are one of the best ways to create rapport between the technology vendor and the client. The vendor must convince its credibility as a good vendor and also prove the SLAs are relevant to the client’s needs.